Blog 6: Perspectives

I’ve learned a great deal about German culture from this course. While I wasn’t expecting it to be a mirror image of our own (having visited Germany and lived in France), I didn’t know many of the smaller specifics and subtleties of German culture. Learning about regional differences was enlightening and studying the school system was interesting. Our educational conventions tend to be something we take for granted here in the U.S., and learning about different education norms is an eye-opening experience. It’s hard for us to imagine deciding which direction our adult lives would go in as early as the fourth grade!

Many aspects of German culture that we studied really struck a chord with me. Like others in the class, I have a strong German background in my family, and I now believe many of the more German habits and values have been passed down to my generation. In a culture dominated by people sharing multitudes of personal information on the internet via Facebook, Twitter, and blogs, it’s refreshing to talk about a culture that values privacy highly in the public realm (not that Germans never twitter or blog, but you get the idea). I like the idea of doing away with superficial niceties.

Lastly, one of my favorite things about studying a foreign language and culture is that it prompts us to think about our own cultural norms in new ways. Things we took for granted begin to seem arbitrary in the face of so many cultures that do things differently. The way we do things is not the only way one can do them – perhaps if more people took the time to study foreign cultures, we’d be able to solve some of our own problems a lot sooner (healthcare, anyone?).